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Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Whatever Happened To Personal Responsibility?

We were having a conversation with a colleague recently
about enforcement policies within organizations. The colleague was asking about
our opinion regarding “3 strikes” policies (or any variation thereof), where an
employee is progressively disciplined for a violation and after the third
violation he/she is automatically terminated. These are similar to zero
tolerance policies, where there are certain “golden rules” that if an employee
were to violate them they would always be terminated without question. In our
view these policies are misguided, because they discourage thinking and looking
at the context of the violation. In general, almost any policy that discourages
thinking is bad. Those policies that discourage thinking and lead to
irrevocable negative consequences for people are particularly bad.

Many times in this blog we have discussed the need to take
the emphasis off employee behavior as a cause of accidents (for example, here,
here, here, and here).
The idea that human error (which includes violations in our book) causes
accident and if we can only get people to follow the plan then everything will
be ok is problematic, at best, and foolish, at worst. The response we get is
often favorable, but there are some who are highly critical of our line of
reasoning. Often these folks point out that we’re removing personal
responsibility from the equation, that we’re letting people off the hook
unjustly. We are criticized as being unrealistic and perhaps just a bit too
idealistic.

Here’s the thing though – even though the discussions
surrounding the new view of human error and human performance often ends up
revolving around ideas of justice and personal responsibility, these are really
side issues. Sure they’re important, but we aren’t lawyers. We are safety
professionals. So justice is less important to us than making sure that we take
steps to make our organizations safer. And if our viewpoint is correct, if many
of the issues we find in our organizations are not because of bad apples, but
due to poorly designed work environments and processes, that means punishing
people not only doesn’t fix the problem, it may make things worse! Our position
is that if someone violates a rule or makes a mistake this is almost always
just a symptom of a bigger problem in the organization. Often the direct issues
lie in competing goals, poorly written procedures, or inadequate management.
Indirect contributing issues often include a misplaced, unquestioning trust in
our ability to plan every aspect of a job.

A big problem we find is that people often don’t consider
other alternative explanations for what they find. They accept their first
explanation without testing it (what you look for is what you find). Consider
what is often a counter-example that is brought to our attention – the case of
the repeat violator. Often people point out that when you have one person who
routinely violates the rules, and they are the only person that we have
problems with, this automatically invalidates our thought process. But couldn’t
an alternative explanation be that the only issue with this employee is that
they are terrible at hiding their violations, whereas the rest of the workforce
is not? Did we investigate that possibility or did we just assume that the
problem is localized to that one “bad apple”? Often the truth is more with the
latter than the former.

Don’t get us wrong - we are not saying that people are
perfect, and we are also not saying that there is never a time where it would
be appropriate to punish an individual. Clearly there are times when
punishment, including termination, is appropriate. However, this should only be
considered when alternative explanations have been considered and dealt with.
Furthermore, we firmly believe that these alternative explanations should be
considered not by people removed from the work environment, but by people who
are familiar with the complexity of how normal work takes place in your
organization. Essentially, what we’re saying is that punishment shouldn’t be
decided by mindless adherence to rules. Rather, people should be judged by a
jury of their peers (meaning people who see the world from a similar
perspective). We expect no less in society, but for some reason we’re ok with
dictatorial and arbitrary exercises of discipline in our organizations. This
needs to stop.

Our position is not that personal responsibility should be
abandoned. Rather it should be expanded. We should recognize that our role is
not to punish violators. We are not police officers. Our job is safety, so what
we are doing should help the people in our organizations be safe. We need to
expand our view following a case of human error/violation from looking only at
the individual to looking at the work process and the organization. How are
these contributing to the problems we found? Are the problems localized or
rampant throughout the organization? How would we know if they were? What can
we do to make the rules easier to follow? What do the co-workers of the
individual think of the violation?

These are the kinds of questions we should be asking
following a rule violation, not simply “how many strikes does this make?”